The application of juliane house's model to the translation of Naguib Mahfouz's "the thief and the dogs" into English

Abstract EN

Translation quality assessment is one of the valid criteria to assess and make a judgment on the quality of translations.

several models of translation quality assessment have been put forward by theorists of translation.

however, the key problem is how to choose and apply a model in terms of assessing literary genre.

this problematic area is going to be investigated in this study.

the main aim of this study is to explore the applicability of house's (2015) model on translation quality assessment in terms of assessing the quality of two translations of Naguib Mahfouz's “the thief and the dogs” novel (1961) into English done by three translators: Elyas (1979), and Badawi and le Gassick (1984) revised by Rodenbeck (1990).

this study hypothesizes that house's (2015) model of translation quality assessment is applicable and useful to assessing translation of Mahfouz's “the thief and the dogs”; mismatching between ST and TT1 and TT2 reveals the key problems that distort literary genre; the pragmatic aspect of meaning is the most serious type of translation problems compared to syntactic and semantic aspects.

the findings of the study revealed a number of mismatches along the two parameters of register (field, mode, and tenor) and genre.

these mismatches caused a change in the interpersonal functional component and ideational component.

it was also found that house's (2015) model was somehow complicated, yet it was applicable.

the conclusions verified the validity of the hypotheses of the present study.